Mark Shuttleworth is trying to entice OpenSUSE developers to join Ubuntu. "Novell's decision to go to great lengths to circumvent the patent framework clearly articulated in the GPL has sent shockwaves through the community. If you are an OpenSUSE developer who is concerned about the long term consequences of this pact, you may be interested in some of the events happening next week as part of the Ubuntu Open Week."

Then maybe he should have said "standing up for what they think is right", "having moral standards".

For a lot of companies, Microsoft and Intel among them, it seems that "how much money can I get" is the only "moral standard" they understand, and the amount of people they screw over is either immaterial or a badge of honour.

So the way you see it, contributing programs for the benefit of a private company like Canonical is more "pure" than programmers writing programs for a publicly traded company like Microsoft or Novell or IBM?

Oh wait ... open source programmers regularly write programs for the benefit of companies like IBM or Novell.

The difference is that those programs benefit everyone else who chooses to use them or develop them further, they're not owned by Canonical. canonical do have some closed source software too, but the vast majority of their development goes straight to the upstream projects.

So the way you see it, contributing programs for the benefit of a private company like Canonical is more "pure" than programmers writing programs for a publicly traded company like Microsoft or Novell or IBM?

Oh wait ... open source programmers regularly write programs for the benefit of companies like IBM or Novell.